Lobenthal.com

Not only did he fail to recuse himself from Bush vs.Gore despite the fact that his son worked for GW’s law firm, Scalia issued the most convoluted, ludicrously ass-backwards rationale for engineering what was, for all intents and purposes, a judicial coup d’etat.

The Florida recount had to be stopped, he and his Supreme conspirators argued, because the truth might have prejudiced Bush’s claim to legitimacy.

This is a man who will live in infamy.

And when students demanded answers to why he had mugged democracy, he told them to get over it, spewing his contempt for the nation, because he could, thanks to the lifetime-appointment sinecure syndrome.

Get over it indeed. Will America be able to get over what Scalia did to us?

Senator Sanders asks why our budget supplies trillions for war, but infrastructure in Flint and many, many other places in the country continues to rot away.

Josh Marshall at talkingpointsmemo is astonished at the way that Williams just makes it up out of thin air to justify what the GOP is doing.

Cenk Uygur details the way that Scalia’s judical decisions were utterly opportunistic, motivated largely by his aggressive promotion of his personal politics, ideology and religious beliefs.

Yes, he was saying over the weekend, the constitutional workings of the United States government and its judicial system should be respected.

Now he’s singing a different tune.

Eric Boehlert at Media Matters for America chronicles the way “the Beltway press almost immediately began to seamlessly frame the unfolding debate about the Supreme Court Justice’s replacement along the contours of Republican talking points. To do so, the press continued its habit of looking away from the GOP’s stunning record of institutional obstructionism since 2009.”

Boehlert reminds us that “Today’s Republican Party is acting in a way that defies all historic norms.”

Steve Rendall of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting responds to Bob Woodward’s preposterous statement on CNN to the effect that the U.S. public would object to any replacement for Scalia who was not as radically, as outlandishly regressive as he.

“Presenting the views of the power elite as those of the public, no matter how detached those views are from actual public sentiment and opinion, is what the national media are about. This largely explains why dullards and fantasists like Woodward thrive in it.”

We see this culturally as well, as the “mainstream” media decides what culture the public will be allowed to experience, to respond to, by providing an ever-more constricted purview on culture.

What we are really now seeing from that media is a daily attempt to legitimize fringe ideas and positions.

You know, if the Republicans prevail in their latest seditious assault on the U.S. government as we have known it, you can bet that if a Democrat is elected president they will–whether in the majority or not (and yes, defeatist Democratic losers, the party may some day regain a majority, in spite of your best efforts)–start further refusing to comply with more and more basic procedural protocol. The grounds will be that in 3/2/1 years some new election will be held and therefore government functioning must wait until then.

The New York Times’ editorial board asks whether the GOP will “be willing to create a constitutional crisis and usurp the authority of the president to ensure that the Supreme Court functions as one branch of this government?”

YES. They will.

Again, the gap between perception and reality–fostered, of course, by our “mainstream” “news” media–is staggering

Tom Engelhardt at Tomdispatch.com exposes the tragic farce of Obama directing more slush toward the Pentagon, to be used, among other things to provoke a war with Russia.

It might as well be the Reagan years again, when the tottering USSR became our deadliest adversary to justify skyrocketing military spending.

Now, more than ever, our military spending is consuming this country and leading to more havoc around the world.